Embarrassing Moment

I will admit that I was a menace in junior school especially when it came to doing anything with my mother. I remember one peculiar day that we were actually getting along like we had been close friends forever so on a whim we decided to go shopping for a white dress I would wear to my nearing eighth grade graduation. Hopping from store to store, there would always be at least one dress to take with me to try on in the dressing room, however, each dress would either be too long, too short, too revealing, or the straps would be too loose, too tight, too thin, or too thick. Sometimes the fit was just odd or the material wasn’t worth the price. It is strange how many dresses can be wrong before a girl can find the right one.

I am sure that I tried on every white dress in every store in the Houston Galleria that day. My mother and I were both on the verge of tearing each other’s heads off with the frustration; I was begging to leave the mall, to put off this misery until a later date, but she was impatient and did not want to put herself through the process again. We stood outside of what seemed it could be the last store we had not been in on Earth and she pointed to a white dress in the back. She grabbed my arm and said, “Come on NOW,” but there was no way in hell that I would dare walk into another fitting room. The way I felt at the time was that this store was one of those mommy-stores, with clothes that only moms can wear, and I was not to be seen wearing ANYTHING from there. She began forcing me into the doorway, pulling me by my shirt collar, my sleeve, and eventually she really shoved me in. She grabbed the dress, which did not come in my size and handed it to me. I placed it back on the rack. She must have picked it up again and I must have put it back again at least one hundred times.

I knew my behavior was childish and stubborn, but I also knew that her strict demand for me to try on a DRESS was insane. Eventually she began screaming at me at the top of her lungs, both of us standing in the middle of the store. When I noticed that the eyes of all of the other customers were fixed on the scene we were causing I allowed her to lead me to the fitting room, but when we got there I tried to explain I really did not like the dress and it was pointless for me to even go through the effort of trying it on. (Funny though, that I went through the effort to NOT put it on.) It was then that she pulled a water bottle from out from her purse and hurled it at my face while yelling at the top of her lungs that I felt she would break a vocal chord. All of the store customers and workers turned pale with their mouths shaped in a perfect O. I have never been so embarrassed in my life.